


The Name Collectors

by Tlon



Series: The Razes [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Dark Solarpunk, Developing Relationship, Hand Jobs, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Neo-Victorian Western, Post-Apocalypse, Rape Recovery, Religion, Rescue, Slash, earnest conversation about the value of human life and then sex, think the pale machines set in into the badlands with flipped class dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-12
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-10-30 21:04:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10884906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon
Summary: Arturo is a scavenger, looking for artifacts from a brighter past on the edges of the poisoned cryptlands. When he rescues a badly injured prisoner from raiders, he doesn't realize the man is a former resident of the insular, deadly New Church. Rian fled the Church in a vain attempt to save his lover, and now he's being pursued by the zealot who killed him – an old friend with her own reasons for hunting him down. No longer able to fight, Rian must rely on Arturo for help, even as he worries he's only putting someone he cares about in danger once again.





	1. Tales from the Cryptlands

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, let's ruin a perfectly good trilogy with another story. As always, this is a standalone novella - probably more than usual - although there are a couple of references to places from the previous installments. We started out in the Eastern Seaboard, then moved to the corporate state of California. Now it turns out the Southwest is the site of a biological warfare zone, a city of religious zealots, and some nice outdoor markets.

_In the desert_  
_I saw a creature, naked, bestial,_  
_Who, squatting upon the ground,_  
_Held his heart in his hands,_  
_And ate of it._  
_I said, “Is it good, friend?”_  
_“It is bitter – bitter,” he answered;_

_“But I like it_  
_“Because it is bitter,_  
_“And because it is my heart.”_

_\- Stephen Crane_

***

Arturo is near the edge of the cryptlands, where dead sand meets poison grass and dry bone, when he sees the stalled dreadnaught coach.

At first he thinks the thing is a relic and he's hit a streak of luck – enough to go back to Lupe without even crossing the penumbra. But the solar weave on top is too bright for that, he thinks, looking down the edge of an old cement overpass. He squints at it, watching for movement, and creeps down to investigate.

There may be nobody around the coach, but Arturo sees a mash of footprints around the trackwheels, leading toward the deceptively green horizon. He looks at the scratched side for a company badge. There's nothing there, only a bright silhouette where the identification must have been once. Bad news.

Arturo squeezes the machete slung over his shoulder and follows the prints toward a scrubby oasis just over the cryptland side, barely breathing. He can probably outrun them, if he has to; whoever it is, he doubts they're as familiar with the land or the arid heat. Treadmen don't know the desert, they only pass through it, looking for pockets of life where they can trade stolen goods or steal some more. He can only hope that if they're good enough shots to hit him, they'll be judicious enough to want to save the bullets. When he finally sees them, he laughs – not because it's funny, but because his body has to deal somehow with all the tension it's just released.

There are three of them, huddled at the bank. At first Arturo thinks they're dead, then that they're drunk. Then he sees the fresh pods cracked open next to them, and his next laugh is from more than nerves. They're not going to be a danger to anyone for the next couple of days.

He'll have to drag them away from the water soon, before they wake and try to drink it in delirious thirst. That doesn't mean he has to feel sorry for them. Or that they don't deserve to be taken for everything they've got.

He finds a key in one of the jackets piled to their side, returns to the coach and swings himself up the wheels with effort. When he opens the door, he recoils. The cooling system isn't running, and the windows are blacked over, leaving Arturo sucking desert air before he steps inside.

Exposed to the outside breeze, it's not so bad, and bigger than he expected. The whole place is made up in the battered, derelict remains of Seaboard style, velvet seats faded and burgundy wallpaper blistered from heat. There has to be something valuable in one of the end rooms. He'd take the whole thing if he knew how to drive it, but even some token goods from a treadman might be worth more than he'd find the whole day otherwise, and they'd certainly be easier to carry.

The group must be between runs, but he grabs a wad of Seaboard bills and an expensive-looking wristwatch with a blank, scuffed screen. The incongruously modern terminal is embedded in the travel desk and too big to carry anyway, though he looks at it in envy.

As he heads back through the common area to the other side, something thumps. Arturo freezes, listening for footsteps or the crack of a door. Stupid – he should have known they might have left a guard. But it's hard to imagine anyone sitting through this miserable heat, when they'd have no reason to hide inside. He draws the machete and opens it. As his eyes readjust to the dim light, he stops short.

The man on the floor looks naked, half-covered by a sheet as tattered as everything else in the place. Rope is twisted around his neck like a collar, leashing him to a steel bedframe. It barely seems necessary. His bound arms are scored with cuts, pale body bitten and bruised, slumped against the wall. It's too clear what they've used him for – who knows how long he's been kept here, tortured for their fun.

“You supposed to be... buying me?”

Arturo starts. The man has opened his eyes and half-focused them on him, mumbling the words through cracked lips.

“Of – course not,” Arturo stammers, recovering. “They're outside. Out cold. I'm not with them.”

The man seems to be trying for a weary smile. Under other circumstances it would look roguish and nonchalant on his young face, under startlingly bright gray eyes. But it's marred by a wince as his lip bleeds under the strain. “Supposed to be taking me, then?”

Arturo almost nods, but he catches the words' innuendo just in time. “I'm not doing anything with you,” he says. “Give me a second and I'll get you free.”

As he steps close, the man flinches away. He looks almost ashamed once he's done it, and he doesn't move at all as Arturo saws at the ropes around his wrists and neck. The skin under them has been rubbed raw and healed and abraded again, and it takes visible effort for him to raise his arms, drawing the sheet around himself.

“There's – there's clothes around here, right?” Arturo asks, more to himself than the man. He's slight but muscled, or at least he was, though starvation and confinement have started to take their due. The shirt and pants and slippers Arturo finds look too big, but he offers them anyways, moving cautiously. “Can you walk?”

“Suppose I'll find out.”

He can't. But he shakes his head when Arturo offers an arm, pulling the clothes on and struggling to half-stand against the wall of the coach.

“Are you from the Seaboard?” Arturo asks, looking at the high, elegant cheekbones beneath the bruises on his face.

This time the man spits a laugh. “Seaboard? Fuck, no. I'm Church.”

Arturo tries to force a smile. “Don't joke about something like that. It's not funny.”

There's no hint of humor in those sharp eyes as he answers. “Of course it isn't,” he says.

Bracing himself, the man turns his right forearm out to Arturo. The skin between wrist and elbow is nearly shredded, as though someone's tried to tear it apart.

“Usually people have the courtesy to wait till you're dead before taking it out of you. But I guess they figured I wouldn't last long anyway.”

The New Church. Arturo's face to face with a member of the New Church.

This time he's the one who flinches as the man tries to take a step forward – at least until he starts to slip, any illusion of threat ruined. Arturo catches him, wrapping an arm around his ribs. “We should get going,” he says. “I'm not worried about them – they'll barely know what's going on, even once they're up. But it gets cold quick out here when the sun goes down, and you probably don't walk so fast right now.”

“Wait.” The man gestures at a crate on the far wall, bearing the brand of some incomprehensibly named Seaboard company. “There's a gun in there, and a sword. Black-hilted ceremonial thing. You get them for me? And the... the record.”

Arturo nods and disentangles himself. The first two items are jumbled into a stack of cheap preserved food – Arturo grabs some, just in case. He isn't sure what the last is supposed to look like, but when he glimpses a blood-smeared corner of fabric, he doesn't need to know. He pulls at it gingerly, trying not to let the cloth unroll as he holds it out.

“It's okay,” the man says, with what sounds almost like genuine amusement. “I don't care if you take a look.”

There's nothing Arturo can remember wanting more and less at the same time. Slowly, he frees the hard object from its wrapping, resting it in his palm. It's a metallic cylinder, its surface furred with dried blood but still perfectly smooth. The only exception is a raised tube at one edge, its inside still gleaming. The thing isn't large, but it looks impossibly big to fit into the mauled space of the man's arm.

“All right,” Arturo says, suppressing a moment of nausea as he wraps it up again. “Let's go.”

For the condition he's in, the man is inhumanly stoic – or maybe that's just Arturo's preconceptions speaking, now that he knows where he's from. Arturo lets him down back beneath the overpass, offering a canteen that the man takes gratefully. “Wait here,” Arturo says.

“For what?”

“It'll just be a little. I have to get them off the water.”

The man looks up. “What do you mean?”

“Those – those men found one of the weeds out in the green. Lots of people think it'll be fun to try once. Ones who don't know much, anyway. They'll be out for another few hours, but when they're up they won't know what's going on. And that pool they're on will eat them from the inside out, if they drink from it.”

“And what exactly is the problem with that?”

Arturo can't answer, or even meet his eyes. There's not a good reason, not one he can explain to somebody who's just gone through what this man has. But there's only death around the cryptlands – Arturo's spent his life sunk knee-deep in it, carrion scavengers and starving children and the silly, little trip-ups that turn people into corpses. The moment he lets someone die in cold blood is the moment he starts to lose his grip on the difference between himself and the coyotes and the flesh-eating beetles. At least the man is too composed, or too tired, to call after him as he leaves.

The treadmen are limp and heavy, but moving them's not so much worse than dragging salvage. Arturo pulls them to the coach one by one, watching for signs of consciousness. As he does, he thinks about the cylinder that belongs in the man's arm, about his fair skin and light, glittering weapons. He's evolved for somewhere that's nothing like the cryptlands – but not somewhere softer, Arturo suspects. The New Church is as good a suggestion as any.

Arturo has never thought of the Church as a myth, exactly. But he's assumed most of the stories about it are exaggerated: a city grown in upon itself, its edges barricaded by miles of Razes detritus, its interior a beautiful maze with rot at the center. Its denizens sheltered from the outside world, and all the deadlier for it.

But if the records are real – the part that Arturo has always found most fanciful – who knows what else might be?

Arturo wonders how the treadmen caught him, what they thought they'd found. Besides _entertainment_. He drops the last treadman in the coach's lengthening shadow, and almost without meaning to, kicks him hard in the chest. Maybe the blow will bruise a rib, break it. Whatever it does, it will be a fraction of the pain they inflicted, over days or weeks. Anyway, he'll warn Lupe and the crossroads council about them; if they stop to trade there, the city watch will take them in.

The treadman stirs slightly, and Arturo realizes how careless he's being. He hurries back, half-wondering if the man will be gone somehow. But he hasn't moved, except to pull the sheathed sword against his side. He doesn't look ready to use it – more like he finds its presence comforting.

“I'll help you up,” says Arturo, trying to telegraph every motion toward him. “My name's Arturo, by the way. Valdez. I scavenge out here.”

“This is the part where I ought to tell you who I am.”

“It would help.”

“Rian Ward.”

Arturo gets Ward to his feet, heading back towards the makeshift camp. If they make it through the night all right, he can go back to Lupe, but he needs to know they haven't been followed – and whether he can trust Ward enough to risk bringing him back. “What did you do at... at the Church?” he asks.

“The same thing everyone does.” 

“And what's that?”

“Fight.”

It's hard to tell whether Ward is hiding something, or if it's just too difficult for him to speak. He's still persevering, but his breathing is ragged now, and he's supporting less and less of his own weight. By the time they reach the camp, Arturo's sleeve is spotted with fresh blood from Ward's arm, which must have opened sometime during their walk.

He wishes Lupe were here, because she would know the best way to clean Ward up – Arturo is the one who finds things, after all, and she's the one who fixes them. He dips into his supply of water and offers a cup of it, steadying it when Ward's hand slips.

“Let me clean your arm up,” Arturo says, fumbling through his emergency bag. He should say both arms, really; they're both cut up along the edges, as if he had them out to defend himself. But that doesn't look like much compared to the mess of his right forearm. “It won't be anything great, but I can disinfect it, wrap it up.”

Ward nods slightly and rolls his palm up, exposing the wound again. If he finds it as grotesque as Arturo does, he hides it well, but he closes his eyes when Arturo prepares to wash it out. Ward's good hand clenches so hard it's white, and when the crusted blood comes loose he bites his fist and gasps. Nothing seems infected, but the strips of skin are still hard to look at. Arturo catches fragments of fibers on the scabs – the men must have wrapped it at some point, however badly. He tries to do a better job himself, and although the results are lumpy, the thing holds.

Ward looks down, flexing experimentally. His hand crooks, fingers half-curling. He massages his blistered wrists and tries again, shoulders tensing. He looks up at Arturo sharply.

“Where's the sword?”

In the fading sun, the weapon nearly glows, silver threads on its scabbard catching the light. The hilt isn't quite black, Arturo sees; its pale metal has been inlaid with dark patterns, worn shiny from use. He holds it out to Ward, who reaches with his bandaged arm.

His grip doesn't catch. Ward can force his fingers through the guard, but they won't support enough weight to let him draw the sword more than a few inches. Arturo wishes he had just left it on the ground. He doesn't think someone like Ward – who's hidden any sign of weakness as much as he seems able – wants him to see this. But leaving would look like disappointment, so he simply watches him struggle with it, trying to keep his eyes down.

“Never mind.”

Ward's voice is toneless, and when Arturo looks up, his face is blank. But in the moment before he looks away, Arturo catches the redness of his eyes, and the damp shine along the skin below them. He nods and rests the sword back on the bedroll.

“Would you mind terribly leaving for a minute?” Ward cuts the last word off as his voice catches. “I'm not in much shape to go for a walk.”

Arturo reaches the outcropping that shields their camp from the southern wind just before he hears Ward scream.


	2. The Hashishin Complex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rian gets back on his feet metaphorically and literally, decides he has nothing to lose, and starts to answer Arturo's awkward questions about the Church.

Someone ought to be dead, Rian thinks.

Maybe it ought to be him – that would be by far the simplest. It should definitely be the men back at the coach, waking up short of nothing but a few trinkets and their toy. Micah is dead, although he shouldn't be. The only person he can think of who's in the right condition is this hard-handed, soft-faced man, who's been kind enough to keep out of sight as Rian breaks down.

He might feel better if he could break something – anything. Slice it to pieces, stamp it under a boot. But his boots must be buried somewhere in a coach locker, and he can't get a blade free, let alone use it. He's too stiff and exhausted to even stand, after what must be days without food, and longer without being allowed more than a few feet from the coach.

The arm is the only serious injury they gave him, Rian thinks. The rest will heal, although it hurts badly enough right now. It's still better than the lingering oil-and-metal smell of the coach, as though he's still trapped there, waiting for someone to remember he exists and hurt him again.

They were bad fighters, every one of them, is the worst of it. If he'd met them one by one in the Church he would have cut them down without hesitation, not even bothered to learn their names and add them to the record. But they found him at the end of a long day walking in the heat, looking for a solar stop. He wasn't sure at first whether he should distrust them more than any other outsider, all of whom seemed equally alien. And no one in the Church would have fought so thoughtlessly, crowding up on him instead of taking his measure and strategizing. That was what did him in – he expected them to care more about dying.

Five men had gotten out when the coach stopped, and only three got back in before it started rolling again, at least. But he'd been with them, beaten and bleeding. He'd expected them to rob him, maybe to rough him up out of pride. At worst, to kill him. Then two of them had held him down while the other cut his clothes off piece by piece, cuffing his face when he struggled. He'd endured the first rape in stunned silence. He'd threatened them before the second. They'd laughed and gagged him after that.

He's not sure how much they knew about his origin, or cared. Even the record they'd taken more out of cruelty than anything else, once he was too starved and hurt to respond with the right fear and revulsion when they touched him. It was the only thing they could have gotten him to fight for at that point, and they overpowered him easily when he tried, forcing him to watch their tools carve and claw at him. That had been the first and only time he'd begged.

It didn't matter, of course. They'd taken it anyway, and even now that he has it back, it's a Pyrrhic victory.

Maybe the arm will heal, he tells himself. Maybe there's someone around here that can do the same surgeries as the Church, or maybe all he needs to do is wait. The suggestions are so pathetic that he stops bothering to keep himself from crying. The only truly good thing he can come up with is that it wasn't Micah in his place, picked up and savagely humiliated. And that's only, again, because Micah is dead.

Reminding himself of that brings enough helpless anger that soon he's run out of tears, and all he can do is gaze blankly past the chemical heater into the night.

He tenses when something moves, reaching for the sword before he remembers he can't hold it. But it's only Arturo, picking his way back into camp.

At least Rian can't find it in himself to be afraid of Arturo, although he knows that in this state almost anyone could overpower him. He's got some specific combination of clumsy friendliness and savvy: too decent-seeming to hurt someone on purpose, too situationally aware to do it by accident.

Rian could be wrong, of course. He has been before.

“You should take the pallet,” Arturo tells him offhandedly. “I'm too jumped up to be sleepy anyway. There's a blanket by the water jug.”

He's keeping watch, Rian thinks – though it's his own fault they have to worry in the first place. By the time Rian stumbles to the bedroll, he's not sure he could object even if he wanted to.

When he jolts awake the next morning, he wonders why someone is shining a torch in his face. There's never light like this in the coach, and no one there bothers to wake him with anything more gentle than a kick. Then he opens his eyes and sees the desert.

It isn't the first time he's been outside the Church, or through the rocks and sand to its south. For now, though, it might as well be. He realizes that he hadn't really expected to leave the coach alive – either he would try one escape too many and go out fighting, or they'd get tired of him and let him starve, leaving his near-dead body to the corpse beetles. Before the weight of new problems settles around him, he looks out across the rocky rose-gold sand, to the sliver of green in the distance. The air is pure in a way he's never tasted in the Church – not just clean, but almost sweet with early-morning warmth. He reminds himself that he'll probably be cursing both the heat and the sand within the hour.

“Food?”

Rian pushes himself up and sees Arturo, his eyes clearer than Rian would expect for someone who's been up most of the night. He's offering one of the dietetic cakes from the coach – the only thing Rian's been fed since leaving the Church, between beatings and worse. He needs to take it, Rian tells himself. Who knows when he might eat next.

“No, I'm sorry. You must be sick of these.” Rian looks up, surprised. He's too tired to conceal his feelings at all anymore, he supposes. But he eagerly takes some dried meat of indeterminate origin and washes it down with the water Arturo offers.

“I don't think anybody's following us. I know the land around here, they wouldn't be able to sneak up, and you can see a mile just about every way. We can get back to my sister today, clean you up. She can take a look at your hand, too. You'll like her.”

“Will I?”

Arturo shrugs. “Don't see why not.”

To his surprise, Rian finds he can walk – being able to eat and drink and move has done more good than he expected. He's still weak, but by midday they've made it to what Arturo calls _close_.

“You doing okay?” Arturo asks, as they stop for water.

“I'm fine,” snaps Rian without thinking, pushing at the hat Arturo's given him to block the sun. “Sorry. I'm – tired, but I'll be all right. Thanks.”

“I was wondering – don't tell me anything you don't want to – but, I didn't think people could leave the Church. Or if they did it was on some kind of assassination. Are you supposed to be, I don't know, going to kill someone?”

“We're not _hashishin_ , for fuck's sake. We don't just go messing with places we're not wanted, except to deal with one of our own. Sometimes people hire out as bodyguards; think we sent some to Seaboard bosses during that big strike however long ago.” Rian can't think of anything more he can say except the long, painful truth. “But I'm not on anything like that. I'm here on my own. And – no, I'm not supposed to have left.”

Arturo nods, and they keep going.

It's harder now, with the sun at its peak and sweat stinging at his cuts. Rian is about to swallow his pride and ask Arturo to stop again before he passes out, but then they crest a hill, and he realizes this must be the place.

The idea of a house standing on its own, a few meters high, would seem ridiculous in the Church. It looks forlorn, fragile – probably is, if a real storm picks up. But there's something brave about living in a place like that, a pin stuck in the southern desert expanse.

Not that there's desert there. The thing's built on a creek, and the scrub around him fades into tall grass as they approach.

“Who's that?”

Rian shields his eyes and looks up. The woman at the door has her own machete, drawn more aggressively than Arturo seems capable of. Arturo gets between the two of them and waves.

“He's all right,” he says. “He was stuck out at the cryptlands border.”

“Stuck? Nobody gets stuck out there. What the hell do you think he...” she gets a look at Rian and trails off. “My god. Come on in.”

Ordinarily Rian would hate the pity he sees there, but he'll take anything that will get him out of the sun and off his feet. He follows her inside and drops to a chair, while Arturo unshoulders his pack.

“Rian, this is Lupe – Guadalupe. My older sister. Lupe, Rian Ward.”

Lupe looks at him dubiously. “How long have you been out there?”

“Not too long, but he's hurt,” Arturo answers for him. “We can talk when he's cleaned up.”

The process that follows feels both improvised and strangely coordinated – the work of two people who know each other well enough to think through unforeseen circumstances with the same pattern and wordlessly divide the solution between them. Arturo helps him to a corrugated washroom and draws a tub of water, and Lupe meets them with a tin of what Rian guesses must be something like opioid powder, because within a few minutes the pain he can barely remember being without has started to ebb. She takes his arm and unwinds the bandage inch by inch.

“Not bad,” she tells Arturo. “Wrap could be smoother, but I guess you're about to get a lot of practice.”

She leaves, and Arturo looks at Rian's borrowed clothing.

“I can take care of myself,” Rian tells him. He's not sure it's true, but he'll take some discomfort over having anyone else undress him.

Arturo pauses, shrugs. “Soap's by the side. Call if you need anything.”

It takes several minutes just to get out of the clothes, partly because he's trying not to damage wounds he can barely feel and partly because whatever Lupe has given him makes the world seem to work at half-speed. When he finally slides into the water, he nearly falls asleep again. For a moment, none of it seems real – if he closes his eyes he'll open them to the tiled walls of a New Church bathhouse, his arm whole again and Micah just outside.

But that would just mean that they'd be in the same trouble as before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've read _House of Wires_ , you may remember the strike as where Confessore made her name. All around not a good time.


	3. A Prayer for No One's Enemy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Arturo's sister has a shaky grasp of the Church's customs, but understands the impetus behind them.

“And you helped them?” is Lupe's first response, after Arturo's told her about the coach and the drugged treadmen. “I wouldn't think even your heart bled that much. They're just going to do it again now.”

“I... I don't know.” The decision seems harder and harder to explain, even to Lupe – she doesn't go out like he does, doesn't see how dead the world feels outside their homestead. “But that's not the point. He'll be a lot better after a few days, but I don't know what I can do for him after that. I can't exactly take him back to the Church, and-”

“Take him where?”

“No, I just mean-”

“Did you say he's from the Church? The New Church?”

“Well, I didn't, but he is,” says Arturo.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“I was about to get to it.”

Lupe has the frozen look she gets when she's furious about something he's said, but knows any other possible response would have been just as bad.

“He can't stay here.”

“I'm sure he won't want to, after he's better.”

“That's not what I mean. _He can't stay here_. You've got to take him to the crossroads, or something.”

Arturo listens for footsteps, but Rian – he seems real enough now for Arturo to use his first name – must still be in the bath. “He's not dangerous. He's, I don't know, I think he's trying to get away from the whole thing.”

“Exactly,” says Lupe. “That's the problem. Who do you think is going to be coming after him?”

Arturo thinks back to their conversation on the road. _We don't just go messing with places we're not wanted, except to deal with one of our own._ “If they couldn't find him in a dreadnaught a few miles off the solar line, how do you think they'd track him here?”

“Don't try to pretend you know what they can and can't do. At least he doesn't have that... thing in his arm, like they're supposed to. That's the big cut he's got there, isn't it? They cut it out of him. Who knows, maybe it tracks him or something. Maybe that's why nobody's found him yet.”

“Wouldn't be because of that,” says Arturo. “They kept it around, in the coach. I think they tore it out just to see what it was. Or to hurt him. Look, if you'd just seen him-”

Lupe cuts him off. “You brought it here too, didn't you?”

“I – yes.”

“Look, he's a mess and he's been through hell and I feel awful for him,” says Lupe. “But it doesn't help anybody if we give him some powders and bandages, and then somebody slits our throats in our sleep and drags him off. I'll do the best I can with him, and you can hand the thing to him and send him back.”

“I'm sorry, I-”

“That isn't what it does.”

Arturo turns. Rian is leaning on the doorway, dressed in the clean clothes Lupe left outside the bath. Even with the cuts and bruises, he looks remarkably better, sharp-faced and a little sardonic.

“Just let me do his arm up again,” Arturo tells Lupe. “I'll come figure things out with you afterwards.”

Lupe nods tightly and leaves, knife dangling from one hand. Arturo grabs the bandages and motions for Rian to sit. He rests his arm on the table between them, and Arturo begins folding gauze.

“She's wrong about the record, you know,” says Rian. “But she's right about the rest of it. Somebody might be coming.”

“Do you really think they'd find you here?”

“Maybe not. But it's a risk. I didn't really care when it was – when it was them, in the coach. But I'm not enough of a monster that I'd put that on somebody who helped me.”

Looking at Rian, Arturo thinks again just how little he knows about the Church. Everything about him feels subtly off, down to his accent, a more pointed version of the society voice Arturo's heard in tapes. He's intense and brittle in a way that few people down here are able to maintain – before they're either worn smooth or broken. Then Arturo catches sight of the livid rings on his wrists and neck again, and wonders how close he might be to both.

“I had to go into town this week anyway, to trade salvage,” Arturo says, after a long silence. “It's not much of a real city, but there's a doctor there can look at you, and you're not that far from a solar stop. Not sure where you want to go, but I can send you there.”

Arturo ties off the bandage, and Rian draws his hand back. The light shirt Lupe brought him doesn't have sleeves long enough to cover it; they can fix that before he goes to town, at least. If it weren't for all the cuts on his arms, Arturo would probably admire the shape of them.

“Sure,” says Rian. “It's about what I would have done anyway.”

For a moment, some of the worry lifts off his features. Then he moves the fingers of his right hand again, and all the tension comes back. Arturo watches him clasp them together with his good hand, squeezing them into a tight fist they can no longer make on their own. His eyes have gone glassy.

Arturo wants to tell him he's sorry, but he knows from experience that would only make things worse. “Go rest,” he says instead. “I'll call you at dinner.”

By the time Lupe has hesitantly agreed to Arturo's bargain, and they've spiced enough gaminess out of some shredded meat to serve visitors, Rian has pulled himself back into a kind of detached, observational state. Arturo senses that it's taking all his focus to keep it intact, so he lets him eat in silence, clumsily lifting the fork in his off hand. Lupe has apparently decided that her plate is too fascinating to look at anything else.

After they've washed up it's Lupe's turn to go over Rian, closing the wounds she deems serious enough to need stitches. He takes it, as always, silently. When they're done, Arturo unsnaps the pallet and offers Rian his bed. He expects Rian to fight him out of pride, but he just nods. Arturo grabs a blanket but stays fully clothed; Lupe's caution is rubbing off on him.

As Arturo goes to cut the light, Rian looks at him, dropping the gaze that suggests Arturo is a mildly interesting geological structure. “Thank you,” he says shakily. “You've been... very kind.” He's out within minutes after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to the folks who're reading. I think I realized during this chapter that Arturo is the only major character in this series who has anything approaching a normal, non-governed-by-dystopian-social-structures life.


	4. Out Here the Good Boys Die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we get our protagonists' backstories out, and they are both unsurprisingly tragic.

Rian steels himself for another long walk, but Arturo turns out to have a sand skiff, equipped with a lighter version of the coach's treaded wheels. As he leaves the house in a pair of Arturo's oversized boots, he wishes he'd thought to ask Arturo to look for his own back at the coach. That means he's getting better, Rian supposes. He's well enough to worry about something that's not hunger, bodily trauma, or the state of his hand.

He's still thought of the hand all morning, of course, starting the moment he woke from nightmares reaching for a sword that wasn't there. There's an ugly poetry to it: he wants to leave the Church, so God takes everything the Church has given him. Not that he's met many people who really believe in Levantine's God, but it doesn't matter. He's a convenient benefactor when things go right, and a comforting explanation when they go wrong.

Already on the skiff, Arturo puts a hand out to help him up. Rian takes it reluctantly, feeling the roughed-plastic calluses on Arturo's palm. It's funny, he thinks. He never felt weak in the Church, where deadliness was synonymous with strength. Out here, it's not just his hand that seems delicate. Even half-healed and weaponless, he might win a fight with Arturo. He's not proud to have done that mental calculation almost automatically, but it's easy math – of the two of them, Rian's the one who would go for a killing blow first. But once he landed it he'd be lost, because Arturo is the one who can keep someone alive in the desert, or go hours under the sun without burning, the way Rian's bare hands have done after yesterday's walk. Rian knows how to kill. Arturo seems to know how to live.

The skiff doesn't make Rian sick the way the lurching, airless coach did. When he feels a twinge of nausea he looks out at the sand flats, and the dim, blocky towers on the verdant horizon.

“What are those?” he asks Arturo.

Arturo looks surprised. “The crypts,” he says.

“Awfully large.”

“Well, they weren't always for dead people.”

“That would make them not crypts, then, really.”

Rian knows less about the West than he does the Seaboard, because the Church's style is too small-scale and straightforward for corporate states – they like their violence in bulk. But he vaguely knows the cryptlands are a sort of accidental buffer between corporate territory and Arturo's no-man's-land. A beautiful garden designed to take all life except its own, including every human being in the cities where it was deployed during the Razes. Some fast, some slow.

They're all lucky Father Levantine stopped where he did, and never made it to the cryptlands. It's the kind of place he might have admired, and no matter how many followers joined him in the New Church founding, Rian gets the feeling he didn't like people much anyway.

“So who is it they'd send after you?” Arturo asks, changing the subject. “A... military team, or something? A lone gunman, like in the tapes?”

“I'm not sure, but I'm guessing gunwoman,” Rian says, weighing how much to reveal and deciding he doesn't care. “Philomena Ward.”

“Your – wife? Sister?”

It takes Rian a moment to figure out what Arturo means. “No relation,” he tells him. “The name's generational, not family. You age out once you've got a secure enough place in a sect. Who knows, she might not be Philomena Ward anymore, if she catches me.” He hesitates. “She was a friend, though. A very good one.”

“What happened?”

“She killed another friend.”

“Why?”

“Because I was supposed to do it.”

“And... sorry, again,” Arturo says. “Why?”

The more Rian thinks through how he might explain it all to Arturo, the stranger it sounds in his own mind. In the Church, internecine duels are part of the architecture, as much as the tower arches or the rubble barrier.

“It's ritual fights, sort of a territorial thing,” he says. “There's a lot of politics behind it, but the point is that you're not supposed to care about anybody too much until you make it into a sect. That's when you can get close to someone, and know nobody's going to make you fight each other.”

“But you didn't,” Arturo ventures.

“His name was Micah. When we learned about the duel, we decided we'd get out together. Philomena caught us at the gate, the moment we were officially apostate. Called us cowards. Shot him in front of me. I managed to get out.”

He leaves it at that, implying that this was all for honor. He doesn't mention that Philomena was there because he'd chosen Micah over her, and he'd had no idea the depth of her anger.

“That's horrible,” Arturo says. He gazes out at the cryptlands, receding now. “Hey. Can I ask you something?” 

“Sure.”

“What _are_ the records for?”

“Well, for recording things.”

“Recording what?”

Rian considers lying – Arturo's never going to see his anyway, and who knows what role people out here think it performs. It will just remind him that he's dealing with someone who probably doesn't deserve his sympathy.

“The duels. People we've...”

“Oh.”

“You must think I'm a hypocrite, only objecting to it now.”

“At least you did object, finally. Even if it took falling in love.”

“Outcome was the same, in the end,” Rian says. “He's dead.”

“Could you have lived with it? If you'd been the one to do it?”

“I don't know.” In the shaded cloisters of the Church, he might have been able to consider the question objectively. Pray on it, as the devout might say. As Philomena probably would. “We'd never have called it falling in love, though. Sounds teenage.”

“I'm guessing you weren't a teenager all that many years ago,” Arturo says.

Rian laughs. “Fair enough,” he says. “What about you?”

“I've probably got a year or two on you.”

“No, I mean, about... love.”

“Oh. I don't know. There's not many opportunities. And even if I did, well, it's dangerous out here. I'm not sure it'd be worth having something to lose.”

It's difficult for Rian to imagine being as alone as Arturo seems. Even at its leanest, the Church never felt empty. “Then you understand the problem,” he says.

Arturo adjusts course, sending a fin of sand past Rian's windowguard. “I think it's just the same all over,” he says. “My parents, they were from Alphanum – you know Alphanum? Anyway they spent their whole lives there, up in California. But one day they screwed something up, and it was down to the cryptlands just like that, to one of those company work centers. Lupe remembers it; not me. I remember when they took us out here, though. Lupe almost died getting me over. And them... well, they did.”

The Church has its dead, too, Rian thinks. There, though, the young die first. He's got his parents, unlike the converts who come back from mission trips outside. But they care for him in a casual, transient way, because it's better not to hold too tight. They would never think to sacrifice themselves for him, even if the opportunity appeared. They're Church to the core – like Philomena.

“I can't even imagine what that's like,” he tells Arturo.

There are lessons in this, is what a true Levantine devotee might say. _Let not your heart beat hard upon the earth, where blade and pistol doth corrupt. Let your undying love be only for the Father, and the Lord thy God, for all else passeth beneath the strangling worm._ They are glib, easy. Insufficient for the weight of human lives.

“Almost here,” Arturo says, eventually. Rian looks up to see the rise of a low, sprawling township. It's nothing like the Church, its buildings not even a shadow of Arturo's crypts. It smells as much of dust as the rest of the desert – but perhaps slightly thicker dust.

As he steps off the skiff, he instinctively puts out his right arm to steady himself and realizes that for at least a few minutes, he'd forgotten anything was wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Father Levantine was briefly mentioned in _House of Wires_ , where a version of his mind may or may not have been integrated into a corrupted quasi-AI. And I guess the Church didn't fight in the bloody intellectual property ground war from _Alphabet City_.


	5. The God of Wisdom, Not of Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which scars are erotic.

Arturo only recalls how long he's been away from the crossroads when he's in the thick of its market, listening to the hum of food stall iceboxes and the bounce of a busker's dub ranchera. He looks over at Rian, who seems unfazed, although his hand keeps straying to where his sword isn't – it's in the skiff, because this isn't a place to brandish weapons one can't use. The crossroads is _chill_ , a concept Arturo isn't sure Rian would grasp even with a written definition.

That will make him good company for Ailuo, at least. She's in the same corner as always, surrounded by fortifications of broken terminals and older, stranger things. Another cryptland work camp refugee, although Arturo has a suspicion that the circumstances of her arrival were more directly criminal than his parents', and her escape due more to shrewd business deals than brute perseverance.

“How's your sister?” she asks him. Then her eyes slide over to Rian, behind their wire-rimmed glasses. “Or did you finally get married and move out of there?”

“Lupe's fine. And this is Rian. He's just passing through.”

“Good, then – I wouldn't like to think you'd let a husband get so damn beat up. He have anything to sell?”

“No, but I do,” Arturo says, dangling the watch.

Ailuo snorts. “You've gone from salvage to ripping off Alphanum execs, I see.”

“No such thing. I found it following some treadmen.”

She balances it on one long-fingered palm, rubbing at the screen with a thumb. “Oh, that wasn't an insult. If you find one and don't rob him I'll be disappointed. Decent piece of work, though, this. Hope they took some hand off getting to it.”

Arturo laughs nervously. He remembers, for the hundredth time, that this is one of the reasons he keeps his trips to the crossroads brief. It's too hard to talk to Ailuo without wondering what she and his parents might have said to each other, if they were still alive. Wondering if his parents would nurse the same simmering anger, or if Ailuo might let hers cool if she had someone to commiserate with.

The watch and Seaboard bills disappear into a drawer, and Ailuo hands over a stack of chits, glancing again at Rian. She's not the first Arturo has caught doing it, whether because of Rian's exotic pallor or predator's gait or simply because even on his way back from half-death, he's good-looking.

“Hey,” Arturo says. “What's the state of doctors here now?”

“Why?” Ailuo asks. “Need somebody to see him?”

“Yeah.” Arturo tries to think of how to explain what he needs without going into details. Then Rian drops his hand to the table and pushes his sleeve up to expose the bandage, closing the grip as much as he's able.

“Surgery,” he says. “It'd need surgery.”

Ailuo puts out two fingers and touches Rian's palm, as though it were one of her antique galvanic devices. “That, love... is going to be difficult here.”

Rian draws it away. “It's all right,” he tells Arturo. “Let's go.”

Arturo rents them a room in a hostel block and leaves Rian there while he finishes shopping. Finally he takes Rian's weapons and record from the skiff. He can go straight to the station the next morning, and Arturo will return to Lupe, safe and alone.

Rian has fallen asleep again, but he jerks up on the bed when Arturo closes the door, hair still damp from the hostel shower. “How long have you been gone?” he asks.

“Few hours. Got us some food.” He pushes up a side table and sets a fold-out box of tinga on it. “Quantico, too. You drink?”

He gets his answer when Rian lifts the carton from his hands. It's his second time eating real food since he was captured, Arturo remembers. And probably their last together.

“I had to guess at the size, but I bought you some things, too,” Arturo tells him, when the food is gone and the carton finished. “You can give me my clothes back before you go, at least. And you've got a pass on the solar. For wherever you want.”

The words come out more forlorn than Arturo meant them – it feels silly, teenage, as Rian might say. But Rian seems just as hesitant.

“This wasn't necessary,” he says. “You helped me enough. I'll make it myself from here.”

Something in Arturo burns through like a fuse. “How? You don't have any money. You've been on your feet for all of two days. Do you even know where you want to go?”

“I can sell the sword,” Rian says. “Go to the Seaboard.”

“And then what? Go door to door asking for surgeons?” Arturo realizes he's drunk precisely enough to still understand he's saying things he shouldn't, but be unable to keep them from spilling out. “Nobody gets by on their own, you idiot. I don't think you know the difference between being self-sufficient and being stupid.”

He stops, worried he's gone too far. But Rian, he sees, is laughing.

“What?” Arturo asks.

Rian leans forward to peel open the bag of clothing Arturo's laid in front of him. “Finally,” he says. “I finally fucking get to see it. What happens when you stop being a saint.”

Arturo watches him unfold a dark long-sleeved shirt with precise one-handed movements. “I'm not a saint. I'm just a half-decent person.”

“A half-decent person would have bought himself the new clothes,” says Rian dryly. “Unless you've got ulterior motives I'm not aware of.”

With surprising deftness for someone who's drunk at least as much as Arturo has, Rian flicks open his oversized button-down. The worst of the bruises are already fading, although that makes Arturo realize just how fresh they must have been when he found him. Under them, Arturo sees a thin white wheal along his ribcage, running across his side.

“Did they do that?” he asks Rian, gesturing to it.

“That? No, years old. You know. Practice wounds.” He peels the shirt off sleeve by sleeve and tucks it into a military-sharp triangular fold. “Honestly that one's nothing. Stabbed in the back, once. That was worse. For all sorts of metaphorical reasons.”

He twists his shoulder, showing Arturo the pitted scar. “You've got to have your own set, don't you?”

“Of what, scars?” Arturo asks. “I mean – I don't fight, not really.”

“Fighting, whatever, I don't care. Just scars.”

Arturo thinks for a moment and stretches out his arm, pointing to a mottled patch. “Slipped off an overpass and landed on it. All these pointy little rocks.”

Rian examines it. “That isn't bad. I'm guessing you've got more.”

He watches intently as Arturo slides off his shoes and exposes an ankle. “Wild dog bite.”

Arturo looks up. It's the most relaxed he's ever seen Rian, and Arturo's not sure if it's the alcohol or the fact that he's on what seems to be familiar conversational ground. “I always wanted a dueling scar,” he says. “Right along the eye. Like that.”

He reaches forward and traces a line up Arturo's cheekbone, to the corner of his eye. His fingers are soft and cool, and he focuses intently on Arturo's face as he draws.

“It's difficult to get it perfect, though. You can make a mistake and throw yourself on God's mercy, and hope you like what you get,” he says. His hand drops abruptly back down Arturo's face, until it's at his chin, thumb just touching his lips. “Or you can be good enough that you slip – just a little, and it's right where you wanted.”

Arturo feels a swipe across the original path again, fingernails etching a momentary line. His heart is beating hard, he realizes, and he wonders if his face is as flushed as it feels. He lets himself take a longer look across the table, until Rian raises his eyebrows and Arturo pretends to be watching a cheap hyperprint on the wall.

Rian pulls his hand back slowly, as if he's not quite sure what to do with it. Then he makes a fist, looking at the bandage on his other arm, and the levity evaporates. “I won't ever do that now, I suppose. Though I'll have my own set on my arms after this. One of the – the bites will stick around for a while. And there's the whole mess here, of course.” He nods downward. “I don't think I'll want to tell people how I got them, though.”

Arturo looks at the bites Rian's mentioned. No, that isn't right – he's just looking at his body, and the fine hairs along his chest. It's better than looking at his face, fixed back in its invulnerable mask. Rian doesn't move, or even look at Arturo as he clears the cartons away. He might as well be in his own world.

Finally, Arturo sits beside him and clears his throat.

“There's one I've never told anyone about,” he says. “Except Lupe. Since she was there when I got it.”

Rian glances over as Arturo unbuttons his own shirt and shrugs one shoulder bare. The scar forms a deep, shiny valley across his upper arm, as though the flesh simply caved in.

“Most of the really bad stuff in the cryptlands is gone, now,” Arturo says. “But once you get near the middle, not everything's worked its way out yet – or it hadn't, a couple of decades ago. It's not just poison there. It's things that will eat at you if you even touch them. They burrow their way into your skin and rot you to pieces.” He tries not to think of the trip across at all, and half of this is only what Lupe has told him, because he was too young to fix it in his head. But he remembers the terrible sense of something growing under his skin, of black necrotic dots along his shoulder. “You have to cut them out and sterilize everywhere they've been. My parents were almost gone by then, and Lupe spent days taking care of me – and she was a kid then, too. If she hadn't, I'd probably be dead.”

The hollows in Rian's cheeks catch shadows – he would look like a portrait of some dark society scion, if not for his rough hair and the raw regret in his eyes. “I could have picked our after-dinner topics more carefully,” he says.

“You had no way of knowing.”

“I could have guessed.”

Arturo shrugs his shirt back on. “You seem like, I don't know – like life's different for you, a different value.”

“Less value, you mean.”

“...Yes.”

“I'm supposed to quote the Good Book at you, now. _All passeth beneath the strangling worm,_ you know. _Better ye seek eternity through death than oblivion through life._ But you... you want to know if it hurts, for me, when it happens to somebody. You want to know if it scares me.”

“Does it?”

“It doesn't seem quite real when everyone makes a show of not caring for it in the Church. But out here... yes, it does. Very much.”

Rian puts his good hand to his right palm and presses the fingers flat one by one, as though counting. “I should be dead. Once to Micah, and once to Philomena, and God knows how many times, how many ways, in that _thing_ , to _them_.” He spits the words like poison. “But the fact that I should be, and I'm not – it makes being alive incredible.”

He presses Arturo's shirt lightly, following the dip in his shoulder. His fingers run up, over the collar and up the vein on the side of Arturo's neck, resting on the hard skull behind his ear. Arturo tries and fails to keep his breath steady.

“I want to ask you something,” says Rian. “And I don't want you to feel obligated, or like you have to be nice about it. You can get angry at me for the timing.”

“Okay,” Arturo answers nervously.

“Would you kiss me, if I asked?”

“What?”

Rian takes his hand back. “No, really, I'm sorry. For making a pass at you right after you tell me about almost dying. You must think I'm a psychopath...”

Arturo wonders if this is a joke, or some detached experiment. But this is the first time since they've met that Rian seems truly at a loss.

“I just don't know what other time there is--”

Before he has time to think the idea through and lose his nerve, Arturo leans in and cuts Rian off with a kiss. He feels him freeze for a second, but it doesn't seem done out of fear – it simply seems, again, that he isn't quite sure what to do. Then he runs a hand through Arturo's hair and draws him closer. Arturo has never thought of Rian as weak, but he's surprised at the strength of his grip as his tongue flicks at the edge of Arturo's teeth, stinging his mouth with the sweet tang of alcohol.

Rian pulls him back on the bed, until Arturo is on top of him, bracing himself with one hand on Rian's wiry shoulder. He feels Rian wince and twist his injured arm up to grab the headboard, never breaking the kiss.

Arturo can barely remember the last time he did this, can't remember if he was so erect so quickly. He lets go of Rian long enough to fumble his shirt off one-handed, while Rian is unbuckling his belt, as dexterously as he does everything. Arturo pulls back to look at him, his lips flushed and hair wild.

“No, no don't stop,” Rian mutters. “Please don't stop.”

Rian is as hard as he is, and he closes his eyes when Arturo slides the last of both their clothes off and touches him, nails sharp against his back. He slides his hand along Arturo's hip and wraps his fingers around his cock, and Arturo groans – nothing could feel as good as this, as good as having this lithe, melancholy man he barely knows straining under him, at the beginning of the last night they'll ever spend together.

He doesn't let himself think of that, only of the taste of Rian's sweat and the clean lines of his ribs and their mutual gasp of satisfaction before Arturo collapses and rolls off him, face resting on his shoulder. The last thing he remembers before sleeping is looking up to see Rian's wry half-smile, as strangely composed as ever.


	6. Beneath the Strangling Worm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Philomena shows up, and Rian can't run forever.

Rian sits up, trying not to disturb Arturo. His arm won't stop throbbing, even after another of the powders Lupe left them with. He washes himself down quietly and slips into his new clothes; they fit well, although everything he's worn out here feels strange and overloose compared to the Church's tailored suits. He leaves the pistol in the bag Arturo's put together; it's had no bullets anyway, since his first futile fight outside. The sword may as well be just as useless, but he buckles it on anyway – it feels at least a little bit more like being fully dressed.

He's not sure where he intends to walk, but he can't sleep knowing that he's leaving so soon and has no idea where he ought to go. He hasn't done contracts outside the city, so there are no connections for him to levy on the Seaboard. He could throw himself on the mercy of a Midwestern commune, or hide his origins and try for the Comb, but no matter where he goes, what is he supposed to do once he gets there? He can still shoot, and maybe he'll still be able to fight better than most people once – if – he's healed. But if anyone finds out he's Church, they'll either fear him or want to prove something to him. The former will leave him isolated, and the latter will be risky in his state.

He imagines getting cornered and caught again, this time with no stroke of luck to get him out, and for a moment he wishes desperately that he could just stay here. Philomena surely can't track him indefinitely across an entire desert; she's got to go back sometime. Maybe he can hide until then, wait until it's safe to stay with Arturo a little longer. For now, he can get some air, and maybe he'll come up with something better. He picks the key disc out of Arturo's pocket, steps outside, and shuts the door behind him.

“Well met, brother.”

He jumps. Philomena is leaning by the light on the other side of the doorframe, one slender black boot planted against the silisteel stucco. The red dot of a cigarillo falls to the ground, and she slides the boot down to stamp it out.

“You don't have to keep that up,” says Rian. “We're not in Church.”

Beneath the shadow of her hood, her lip curls. “But the Church is in us, always. Or at least, in me.”

Rian looks down at the wire door that's supposed to keep the hostel block secure. It's closed, apparently untouched. She must have climbed the fence, or picked the lock somehow. Or maybe she just waited until someone else walked in and followed them through.

“How long have you been out here?”

“Long enough to see your _friend_ show up,” she says, putting a fine point on the word. “All that time you spent saying Micah was the only one you wanted – well, you got over that quite quickly.”

She's needling him, that's all. There's no point protesting that Micah is dead because of her.

“I'm not going back,” he tells her instead.

Philomena jerks her head back, shaking off the hood. “If you're going to stop me, go ahead. We'll fight for it,” she says. “Like old times.”

Her hand taps the top of her scabbard restlessly. Rian doesn't move, only holds her gaze.

Philomena lunges, and Rian grabs at his sword instinctively. But she makes no move to draw her own, only watches him struggle. She grabs his arm and squeezes, while he tries not to make a sound.

“You can't do it, can you?” she asks.

Her grin has too many teeth, all of them too visible, like a carnivore's skull. She peels his shirtsleeve up to see the bandage underneath. “Who did it? Another one of ours, out here? Did you do it yourself? Or... did you not want it out? Did some sad ordinary bastard hold you down and cut you up? That's pathetic.”

“What about you, then? Wandering around here skulking in corners, hoping you'd find me?”

She laughs. “How many places could you have been? I knew you'd never got on the train – one of Astor's people owed us a favor there. There's nowhere else that's even close besides this place. You took longer than I thought you would getting here, but I guess you were... busy.”

“I don't know what you think, but--”

“I think he isn't bad, you know? You have taste.” Rian forces himself to stay quiet as he makes the mental leap that she's about to. “I was supposed to get you back alive. But the way you are now, I think they'd forgive me if I killed you here and came back with a convert.”

“No,” he says. “Don't.”

She draws the sword smoothly, its red-and-gold hilt catching the light. Its blade tickles against his throat. “What?”

“Don't take him.”

The blade stays even across his neck as she walks around him, until she slides behind him and whispers in his ear. “Are you begging?”

It's like being back in the coach, dark and stifling. “Yes,” he tells her, trying not to let his helpless fury show. “Please don't take him. I'll come with you.”

“That's no kind of bargaining chip. You can't offer me something I would have gotten anyway.” She grinds her thumb into his bandage, until he finally screams, stifling it before anyone in the hostel seems to hear. “So what else can you give me?”

She lowers the sword, as if she already knows what he'll do. He doesn't disappoint her. Turning, he puts a hand to her cheek and kisses her.

Her tongue is cannabis-sour, and the thought of her smoking outside the mirrored window as he was in bed with Arturo nearly makes him sick. She's the one who's pathetic, traveling so far for something so petty. Although as petty as it is, it's difficult to endure – the hands that killed Micah holding him close, gripping his hair.

Finally, she lets him go.

“Can I tell him, at least?” Rian asks her. “Tell him I'm leaving.”

“My God, you fall fast, don't you?” She rests her hand lightly on his arm again. “No goodbyes. Unless you're ready for me to make it a final one, for both of you. Is that worth it?”

“No.” He raises his right hand in submission and works the sword belt loose with his left, letting it clatter to the walkway.

“That wasn't necessary,” she says. “I know you aren't a threat.”

He swallows the sting of her words. “That's the point,” he says. “Why bother with it?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very few Razes characters are visually based on actual people, but I cannot shake seeing Philomena as Zypher from _Into the Badlands_.


	7. Lords of the New Church

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Philomena departs for the Church with her unwilling apostate, and Arturo follows.

Arturo wakes, not sure if he's heard the cry he remembers, or only dreamed it. He's been dreaming of the depths of the cryptlands, for the first time he can recall in years – not the real ones, which he barely remembers, but a version carved from the formless horror only found in sleep. But the scream feels too specifically real, and too much like Rian – and when he reaches out, Rian is gone.

Arturo gets up and stumbles across the room, feeling for the light. Before he reaches it, though, he catches shapes outside the window, thrown into relief by the walkway's sodium light. He recognizes one by the points of Rian's tousled hair. The other stands level with Rian, its posture plank-straight. The shape merges with him, crosses, and for a moment both figures are perfectly still. Then they've collapsed together, folding into an origami embrace.

Arturo's heart feels as though it's stopped beating. Immediately he feels stupid because of it, feels stupid for feeling anything so intense for a man he's known only a few days. He's shared more with Rian than with anyone for years, but – _we'd never have called it falling in love,_ he remembers Rian saying. Of course he wouldn't think anything of moving on to someone else. It's what he's meant to do.

The shapes part after what feels like forever. He hears the unmistakable clang of metal on metal – something heavy falling to the deck outside. Then, the second figure flourishes its arm, in what Arturo realizes is the sheathing of a sword.

This is her, Arturo thinks. He tugs on his clothes and rushes outside.

“What's going on?”

Rian seems to hear him first. “Go back,” he hisses.

Then Arturo is staring into the glistening barrel of a pistol just like the one he pulled from the coach, and behind that, into the blue eyes of Philomena Ward.

Even though Rian's said the names mean nothing, the two of them could be siblings, with the same tough, slender frames. Philomena is paler than he is, though, and her features more elfin beneath her braided blond hair. Her cheek has a short, white streak across it – an exact mirror of the line Rian traced.

“Has Rian told you about me?”

“Of course he did. You're a monster.”

“ _To the outsider, the defender of purity takes only the form of the grave._ ” Her voice is young, sing-song. “Levantine 12:34. You wouldn't have read it, I suppose.”

“That doesn't matter. You don't have any right to make him go back.”

A smile blossoms across her face, an unsettling mix of cruelty and genuine happiness. “But he wants to leave,” she tells Arturo. “He's in love.”

One of Philomena's hands never leaves her sword's hilt, Arturo notices, as she winds the other around Rian's neck and forces their faces together. Her kiss is nearly violent, and when she lets Rian go, there's fear in his eyes.

What can Arturo do, though? Even if he were armed, he doubts he could win a fight against her. If Rian's scream hasn't brought anyone, he doubts calling for help would either, at least in time to stop Philomena from killing them both. All that's left is to back away, nearly tripping over Rian's sword in the process.

“Right,” he tells Philomena. “I understand.”

“Go back to your room, then. Go to sleep. When you wake up, you can tear that thing apart for scrap or sell it at... market, or whatever you people do to stay alive.”

Slowly, Arturo kneels and gathers Rian's sword from the ground. He turns to open the door and realizes that it's locked, and he left the key inside.

“Here.”

Rian draws the disc out of his pocket and holds it out, keeping his eyes on Philomena. She nods and lets Arturo approach, and they exchange it silently, with the slightest brush of fingertips.

“Goodbye, then.” Philomena waits for him to go inside, Rian stiff at her side. Through the window, Arturo watches her put an arm around him and guide him away.

He finds the light this time, then his shoes, then gathers everything in the room and leaves – he doesn't want to see Philomena if she comes back here for some reason. Besides, there's too much to do already.

The hostel now feels like a stupidly long walk from the center of town – maybe if he'd chosen somewhere better she wouldn't have been able to take Rian. When he gets there half the market stalls have closed, and the busker has a handful of competitors, playing their own _corridos_ at street corners. But Ailuo is still there, chewing a lozenge of some terrifying processed foodstuff and laying out a deck of hypercards in solitaire formation.

Arturo taps at the imaginary door of her scrap fortress.

“Little late, isn't it?” The light catches her glasses as she looks up, and she sets the cake on a flyer next to the cards. “Where's your friend?”

“That's what I'm here for. I need to find the New Church.”

Ailuo bites her lip. “So that's where he was from. Shouldn't he be able to tell you that himself?”

Arturo wonders how she guessed Rian might be Church – the arm, he imagines. “He's gone. I need to follow him.”

“That seems like his business.”

“No – I don't mean follow him, like that. They sent somebody after him. They took him.”

She picks up a handful of the hypercards and peels them apart one by one, placing them in neat rows. “And how would you plan to get him back, if you found him?”

Arturo takes off the bag and shows her Rian's pistol. He's never shot something like this, only the big rifles Lupe keeps oiled around the house. But he'll never have to use it, he promises himself, despite the quiet voice telling him how delusional that notion is. He'll threaten her, or distract her, and Rian will take care of getting himself out somehow.

“Mmm.” She takes a look at its filigree and returns it. “Do you even have bullets for that thing?”

“I'll get bullets.”

“Right, love.” Ailuo spins her chair and kicks herself back to her wall of terminals. “Suicide is an honored tradition in California, you know. But I'm not sure that's what you're going for.”

She's right, of course – it's a bad idea. But he can't stand the last, hopeless look Rian gave him, or the idea of leaving him to be hurt by someone else, after everything else he's been through. Because no matter how unlike the treadmen Philomena looks, Arturo can recognize the same callousness in her, the sense that she feels surrounded by things rather than people.

“I don't want to die. But I'm not leaving him. And without help I'm not even going to know where to start,” Arturo tells her. “So, can you help me?”

“Of course,” says Ailuo. “I may not believe in dying, myself. But if you're determined to do it, the Church seems as worthy of fucking with as Alphanum.”

The thing she gives him is some sort of triangulator, pressed with a libretto of what Ailuo says are coordinates.

“How do you know where it is? Not that I doubt you,” Arturo adds quickly.

Ailuo snorts. “It's a whole goddamn city. How could they hide it?” She pops the box off her terminal and hands it to him. “They just rely on the whole thing sounding too insane for people to believe. Like the Thinking Rigs, or the Wall of Walls up by the Rockies. Though that one's real, you know. At least from what I've heard.”

He tries to pay, but she won't take it – just tells him to return it when he comes back, with the small bitter laugh he's heard from her on so many topics. As he prepares to leave, he remembers something.

“Hey,” he says, drawing the record from the bag. “Can you look at something for me?”

She looks dubious, even mildly disgusted, when he unwraps it. But there's still a note of fascination as she prods until she sees the shining port.

“They must leave this part open,” she says, nudging it with one long nail. “So you can re-press it, through the skin. What's supposed to be on it, anyway?”

“Not sure,” Arturo lies. “Do you have anything that will read it?”

As Ailuo pulls down a box of cables and sorts them out methodically, Arturo wonders if he really wants to do this. He knows Rian must have killed people; he doesn't need to know how many, or who they were. But if he's going to go to so much trouble to look for him, on a journey that he may well not come back from – well, he at least wants to know.

“Guess I shouldn't be surprised it's an old standard. Thing must barely hold any data, for how big it is. You still want a look?”

Arturo nods. She pushes a cable into it, avoiding the blood, and hooks it to one of the upper terminals. On the amber screen in front of them, the record appears.

It's a table, its contents a comma-separated list of dates, names, and medical descriptions. Arturo skips these, glancing over the coldly technical terms for various ruptures of the human body. The names mean nothing to him either, save the Wards that he picks from among them. He only counts the rows: eight. Eight people, eight deaths, eight killings at Rian's hand.

Ailuo doesn't ask what they're looking at, but she must see Arturo's expression change. “You still want to go?” she asks gently.

Arturo hesitates. “Yes,” he says. “Of course I do.”

She lets him doze there until morning, when a smith can take a look at the gun and sell Arturo some rounds to match it. He leaves the record with her when he goes.


	8. This Is Not a Love Song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is an intense fight scene that does not necessitate me knowing how actual duels work. Plus more religion.

Philomena holds Rian's hand like a child all the way to the boatyard, where she guides him into a skiff he hasn't seen, dark and close-topped. She's got more cause than Arturo to block the sun – she's much paler even than Rian now, despite how much of his time out here he's spent shut up. Then she pushes him back onto the floor, against the wall, where a metal bar digs into his back.

“Keep still,” she says, turning back. When she approaches again, he sees she's holding a length of rope.

“You don't need to do that,” he tells her. “I told you, I'm coming with you.”

She ignores him. The rope settles around the remaining blisters on his wrists, but the physical discomfort isn't as bad as the feeling of being restrained again. She pulls the knots until they bite his skin, then kisses him again and starts the skiff.

Philomena seems less comfortable with the controls than Arturo, but Rian has never doubted her recklessness. He sees the lights of town recede behind him, the desert's darkness swallowing the sand ahead. At first it's a comfort that she doesn't seem inclined to speak to him, but the longer they drive, the less he realizes he knows about her plans. He doesn't know how far they are from the Church, since he's spent most of it on the start-and-stop pace of the dreadnaught, with no sense of the passing of time. He doesn't know what kind of death the Church might have waiting for him at home. And he doesn't know what she's going to do with him on the way back.

Arturo was right – the desert is cold at night, even in the closed cabin. Philomena drives by the dim forelights, leaving the two of them in the dark. If she's been willing to go this far for him, maybe he can convince her to help him, to set him free once he's done enough for her. Or at least she might untie him, if he flatters her.

She doesn't so much as look at him until the day begins to break. Over the edge of the skiff, he can just see the void of sand on the horizon, light and pitiless. Then, she veers.

“What's going on?” he asks.

Her cloak is thrown over one shoulder now, revealing the dark Church waistcoat and pants. “Instruments say there's a sandstorm coming,” she says. “There's an overpass eye ahead, we can weather it out there. Besides, I think we're due a little time alone.”

“Can you – can you let my hands go? They're going numb.”

“You should feel lucky you even have them. That was what Levantine wanted to cut first, for cowards.”

The tone cuts off any possible rebuttal. He has nothing to do but wait until she parks them in the shadow of the broken road, unclasping the cloak and approaching him.

Her breath is cool on his neck as she looses the rope, and her voice is icy as she draws back and stands in front of his kneeling form.

“Undress,” she says.

“What?”

Philomena whips his neck with the flat of her sword, sending him to the ground. “You heard me. I want to see what they've done to you.”

There's no one holding him down now, but he's just as trapped as before. He tries to get it over with quickly, yanking his clothes off without looking at himself or her.

She kicks him in the stomach, and he goes down, eyes watering. When he tries to get up she straddles him and pins him onto his back, one hand forcing his wrists above his head. With the other, she strokes his face, then lets her fingers drop to his neck, against the abrasions from the men's rope collar. Her blue eyes would be guileless to anyone who didn't know her as well as he did, as she whispers: “Tell me about this.”

She drags out the story of his imprisonment, matching fingers to the bites where his captors' teeth drew blood. She listens like a priest hearing confession, but he knows that she's doing this because she wants to humiliate him, prove that he could never have made it on the outside by himself.

At some point Rian realizes that he's crying – first tears trickling silently down his cheeks, then cracks that he can't keep out of his voice. It doesn't feel cathartic to tell her, the way that talking to Arturo seemed to help put everything at a distance. It's as though she's making him repeat all of it, with her mocking voice in his ear.

“Why didn't you kill yourself?” she whispers. “Any decent person I know would have wanted to die, after letting someone do that to him.”

“I didn't _let_ them,” he spits. “There was nothing I could have done.”

“You could have kept the faith. You decided that you didn't want God's protection, and he took you at your word. You decided that you were more interested in the world. He gave you all the education you could ever want.”

Philomena isn't mocking the idea, he realizes. She genuinely thinks that a force she believes in, a force she adores, approvingly offered him up for torture and mutilation and painful, suffocating terror. She can sit here with a straight face and pretend she loves him, and say that he deserved every minute of it for refusing to fight Micah.

One of her fingers stems the flow of a tear. She dabs it to her lips, then puts the hand back to his face and runs it in a contoured line down his chest and to his groin. It isn't only a belief, either. She's trying to justify her own rape of him, insinuating that he's fair game for anyone who wants him. Because it was true enough on the coach.

He doesn't have any of the courage he had there, though – it's all been worn out of him, cut out along with the record. “No,” he pleads. “Please don't do this.”

She pulls him to his knees in front of her and reminds him that he's promised, and, anyway, there's still nothing he can do.

Philomena keeps him bound every moment she's not watching him, sword in hand. Rian tries to find his way back to the flat, senseless place he was before Arturo drew him out of it. He tries not to think of Arturo at all, except to be grateful that he got to see him one last time, and to hope that he didn't believe what Philomena told him, the lie that he was leaving willingly.

But he seems to have been cursed with perfect clarity. He knows that he could have stayed with Arturo as long as he wanted at the house in the desert, and no one would ever have found them. And that he could have been happy with Arturo, at least as happy as he could be anywhere. And that he'd gone exactly the wrong direction to the solar station, on that very first day out – that if he'd taken the right way, he'd have never run into the men at all, and he would be god-knows-where, still a creature of steel instead of one tied to the wall of a transport waiting for a woman he hates to take him to his death. But while he'd pick anything over his current situation, he doesn't know which of those two other paths he'd rather be going down.

And all the while they're getting closer to the Church, although he has no way of knowing how close.

“What's going to happen to me?” he asks Philomena finally, just after she's buttoned up her waistcoat and allowed him a drink of water as he dresses. He's never known someone to go apostate in quite the same way as he has – it can't simply be a quick execution.

“Well, they'll let you heal, I expect,” she says, tucking a lock of hair back into her braid. “And then they'll kill you.” She smiles, leaving him to imagine how.

“They had you go through a lot of trouble getting me back for all that,” he says, and this time he's the one needling her – he's almost certain she asked to come, and that they won't be happy with how long she's been away, even if that doesn't make things better for him.

“What are you trying to say?”

“You don't want them to kill me,” he tells her. “You can leave me out here. Keep me until you're... until you're done with me, and just tell them you shot me, they won't care.”

Philomena takes the water back. “Why would I cheat myself out of being the one to bring you in?”

“Because you love me,” he says.

She laughs, so long he's almost insulted. “I don't love you, Rian. I want you. If you understood the difference, we wouldn't be here.”

He doesn't bother talking to her for a long time after that.

The heat and hunger makes it difficult to sleep, but eventually he manages it, off and on. Philomena seems to be getting tired of him, and although he knows that just means he has less time left to live, it's difficult to feel bad about it.

Until one morning he wakes up at dawn, and realizes that they're at the barrier.

Philomena must have reached it during the night, because they're inside the entry corridor, its twisted metal ribs rising above them. This is it, then – they'll be at the gate soon, and he'll have no chances left. Whatever he does, he's dead.

“Hey,” Rian calls to her hoarsely. “Hey. Mina.”

She slows the skiff to a halt. “Yes?”

“We're almost here, aren't we?”

Philomena raises her eyebrows. “Yes. Do you have a point?”

“No – no. I was just thinking... this is it for us, isn't it? They won't exactly let you visit me.”

“I'd think you'd be glad of that.”

He wants to snarl that he is, but no – if he wants to have any chance at all, he's got to seem cowed, hopeless.

“I know,” he says. “I would have been. But – God, Mina, I didn't expect to be scared.”

Philomena opens her mouth to say something.

“No, I know. It's pathetic,” he says. “But I just, I don't know – I'm going to miss you.”

She doesn't seem convinced, exactly, but she seems at least confused. He presses on. “Will you just wait with me? Just a little longer? Please?”

“You're right, you are pathetic,” she says. But her tone seems softer. “And what do you want to do, with your last hours?”

“I don't know. Don't you – want me again?”

Her smile is inscrutable. “You really are scared,” she says. The look on his face must convince her, because she leans back down to loosen his ropes, gun pointed at his head. It ought to be convincing, Rian thinks – he's terrified. But that's exactly why this might work.

He waits until she's unwound the ropes and is starting to stand. Then he surges to his feet as quickly as he can, grabbing for the pistol.

It does work, almost. Philomena loses her grip, but she strikes his wrist as he gets a hold of it, sending the gun flying into the far corner. Rian lands heavily, and she backs away, drawing her sword. She's got the same instincts as him; she'll want to pull back and strategize. He's got no way to defend himself, and a stitch in one of his cuts has popped, stabbing at his skin. But that means he'll probably be as dangerous to her as he ever could be – because all his choices are equally bad.

Philomena circles, cutting off his route to the gun. He feints, as though looking for a way out, watching her eyes follow him around to the door. She's going to try to cut him off there as well, and she's going to try not to kill him, if she wants to take him in.

Instead, he dodges back toward her at the last minute, knocking her back. She gets the sword in front of herself just in time, and he feels it slice through the cotton of his shirt into his skin. But he manages to block it from going deeper, and throws her off balance as he does, toppling over her.

She looks up at him, and then, every one of her sharp teeth showing, she smiles. “So you want you name written somewhere after all, do you?”

She plants a boot in his thigh and kicks him off. He lands heavily, and she nearly runs him through in the moment before he gets his bearings and rolls. The sword thuds against the silisteel cabin floor instead, and he pushes back toward her.

He's going to have to take her down soon, or not at all. His shirt is slick with blood, and he can feel it seeping into the bandage, through the barely healed scabs around his torn skin. He's lightheaded from this much motion all at once, and his hands are aching from their long confinement. But she seems flustered by his suicidal aggression. It isn't that he's a better fighter than her – he wouldn't be, even under normal circumstances. If she were fighting him like a Church member, he'd be dead. But Philomena lives by placing people into tiers and categories. Since his departure, she's rendered him something less than a serious threat, the kind of thing it would be unseemly to expend too much effort beating. If he can hold out a little longer, he can prove her wrong.

But he makes his first real mistake then, and hesitates. Philomena comes after him with a slash, and he puts up his bad arm against it, screaming as the edge his his forearm. Gritting his teeth, he lets it slide past him, using the momentum to get close to her. With all the leverage he can muster, he bashes his forehead into her nose.

She doesn't scream, quite. But she makes a strangled noise and falls back, blood trickling into her brilliant, feral smile. He's never seen her like this, with no hint of her normal otherworldly distance. It's getting harder to stay on her, though, and if he rests for even a second he can feel dizziness creeping up on him. He can't take another blow like that, and the blood on his clothes will start hindering his motion soon. And now Philomena is bearing down again, catching him off-balance. There's none of the earlier condescension there; her eyes are fixed on him with single-minded fury.

Which means that she probably isn't thinking about the gun.

He pulls himself nearly out of her path, but not enough to stop her blade from piercing his shoulder as he scrambles away. He can't feel his right arm at all as he makes for the far end of the cabin, following the flash of silver in the corner of his eye.

Philomena catches what he's doing and tries to flank him. But she seems less steady now too, and it's hard for her to get at him while he's on the ground like this. There's not enough time for her to close the gap between them before he gets his hand around the grip, squeezes tight, and fires.

The recoil tears through his wrist, and he barely manages to keep a hold of the gun. But when he looks up again, he sees Philomena collapsed to one knee, eyes in the distance and off hand pressed tight to a dark spot on her side.

Swallowing hard, Rian fires again. This time he fumbles the gun from the sting of the shot, and he can't move well enough to pick it back up; everything seems shifted slightly off, like he's stepped through a mirror. But Philomena is down, stiff on her side, darkness blooming where her waistcoat meets the linen of her shirt. One gold button has pulled loose, dangling like a gouged eye.

Her own eyes, blue daggers, are still open. Nothing is behind them.

Rian falls back, staring at the ceiling of the cabin. He waits to pass out, but unconsciousness doesn't come; he only lies there, immobile, feeling the blood on his shirt crust in the desert air. This is the end of it, he thinks. It's a way to go that the Church might approve of, although there's no one here to see it, and no one to inscribe him on Philomena's record – since she's surely killed him here, even if she may not have lived to see it. And her...

“Sorry, sister,” he whispers to the silence. “I've got nowhere here to write your name.”


	9. In the Desert, Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which I sort of drew a map to figure out where all the stuff in this story was, but then I forgot which markings I'd assigned to which parts, although it definitely did all work out geographically. In any case, here's a road trip.

Arturo begins to worry about his food and water supply on the second day. He's got plenty, but it's just hitting him how little he knows about the place he's entering. His life has been decades of filling in the tiny hollows on a map he now knows by heart, staying within comfortingly familiar – if never safe – territory. He's never been this deep into the desert, or covered this much space so quickly. There is no time to learn this place or make it his own, only to move through it, small and timid.

He's not sure exactly when he first sees the mound in the distance, shaped like a spindly mountain that's been worn down over millennia. Even from far away, it feels like it's looming over him. He pushes the skiff faster. The closer he gets, the harder it is to keep track of what's in front of him; his eyes keep drifting upward, straining to pick out details – the lines of individual towers, taller than the crypts, or the harsh textures that cut them off midway down. Then it seems to rush up on him at once: one moment, he's watching the city in the distance; the next its towers have disappeared behind tall stacks of rubble. The barrier.

There's only one way in, according to Ailuo – he'll have to run the perimeter until he finds it. Then he'll just hope he's pushed himself fast enough to cut them off.

The rubble is dry and barren, but it still reminds him too much of the cryptlands' ruins. Through the thick, rusty bars that keep its contents in place, he spots the occasional windowsill or doorway, the skeleton of some piece of ancient furniture. The city is a legacy of the Razes, razed in the most literal sense – like a snake overdue to shed, strangled and stunted by its own dead skin.

No sign marks the entrance once he reaches it, a canyonous gash in the city's hide. He can't even see the end of the rubble, twisted as the path inside is.

He shouldn't go any farther. He should wait at the mouth, where he can hide if anyone comes out. But he keeps thinking that Rian might be just around one of these corners – whatever kind of vehicle he might be in, however close Philomena might be. Part of him knows that he's too late – there's no way he could have made better time than someone who knows the way here, with a head start to boot. But then he sees the black-topped thing tucked into a twisted-metal alcove, and stops short. That's got to be them.

Arturo reaches for Rian's pistol, watching for Philomena. But there's no movement at all through the windows, and no footsteps traveling outside. It's an odd hour, but maybe they're asleep. What will he do if they are? Shoot Philomena in cold blood, the only way he's ever likely to outmatch her? Wake Rian and try to escape unnoticed?

Cautiously, he steps onto the skiff. He shields his eyes from the sun, squints, and peers inside.

The cabin is an abattoir. Blood glistens on the floor, still liquid from what looks not like fresh egress, but sheer volume. Two figures – dark clothes, pale skin – lie in the heart of it. Neither is moving.

Arturo's fear is replaced by something deeper and more painful. He clumsily pushes through the door and stumbles to Rian, shins sticking to the silisteel as he kneels beside him.

“Hey,” he whispers. He looks back at Philomena to see if he's roused her too. But her empty stare tells him that she will never care for what anyone says again.

For a moment he worries that Rian might be dead too, until he realizes that he's breathing – slowly and deliberately, as if he needs to tell his lungs to keep filling. His arms are pressed to his chest, compressing what looks like his most serious wound, judging by blood.

“Hey,” Arturo tries again. “Hey. Rian. Wake up. No, really – come on. Please.”

After an interminable wait, Rian lifts his head.

“Hi,” he says, his voice weak but strangely unsurprised. “Good to see you.”

“I – I'm glad,” Arturo stammers in confusion. “Did you... know I was coming?”

“It makes as much sense as anything else,” Rian says. “If I'm going to hallucinate, I could do worse than you.”

He can't have been here that long, Arturo thinks. Maybe he'll be all right if Arturo can get him out. “You're not hallucinating.” Arturo puts a hand to Rian's forehead – hot from the sun, but not feverish. “I'm real and I'm here and I'm going to take you back if you're... okay...”

The smile fades from Rian's face. “God,” he says. “You really are. And you're an utter fucking idiot. I cannot believe anyone would do something so stupid. Something so stupid for me...” he runs out of breath and composes himself. “What the hell were you thinking?”

Arturo ignores him, because once again, he can't explain his actions in a way that makes sense. Instead, he looks at Rian's fresh wounds, although it's difficult to even make them out under his blood-soaked clothes.

Rian is still excoriating him. “Do you know what they would have done if somebody'd found you? And if Philomena had found you, if I hadn't managed to kill her?”

Arturo feels a twinge of regret for having looked at the record. Eight names, he thinks. No, nine now.

“I'm sorry,” he tells Rian.

“Oh god. God really?” Rian gives a laugh that's tinged with hysteria, and it seems to jar something painfully loose in him. He lies back, looking away from Arturo. When he speaks again, his voice is rushed and wavering. “Did you just apologize for saving my life?”

“I haven't saved it yet. We need to get moving. You probably can't walk, can you?”

Arturo thinks he sees Rian shake his head, but it's hard to be sure. He wishes he'd thought to bring more than the bare first aid supplies he has in the skiff, or someone else who could have helped him move Rian. Instead he steers the thing as close as he can and gets Rian to his feet, helping him take fumbling half-steps outside – it'd almost be easier to carry him.

When Arturo gets them to the skiff, Rian pushes him away. “We need to go now,” he says. “Now.”

As much as Arturo hates letting Rian go without care even temporarily, he's right. They need to get out of the shadow of the Church before they stop for anything, even getting him cleaned up.

“Should we take her?” Arturo asks, gesturing back toward Philomena. “I don't know, bury her?”

“No. She'd have wanted the Church to do the honors. Not that I really care what she wants. But I don't want to see her again, either. Even dead.”

Arturo starts the skiff. He navigates the turn around her makeshift black tomb, momentarily worried he's forgotten which way will take him out of this corridor. Then he regains his bearings, turns a corner, and the last traces of Philomena Ward are gone.

They go far enough that the city is small in the distance, then shelter on the side of a short cliff. “We're okay for now,” Arturo says. “Let me get you fixed. As much as I can, anyway.”

He pours a pan of water and offers Rian painkillers that he takes reluctantly. Then Arturo begins the delicate process of peeling off the shirt he bought just days ago, its fabric stiff and black with blood. The wound underneath isn't as deep as he'd feared, but it's long, open like a ghoulish smile. Arturo closes it with jagged stitches, it and the gash on Rian's arm, which reminds him strangely of the New Church's entrance cut into the rubble. He cleans out the puncture on his back and leaves it open.

Rian looks down at the bandages and smiles thinly. “I got my scars, I suppose,” he says. “Not quite where I wanted.”

He closes his eyes, and that's the last thing he says for the rest of the day. Arturo isn't sure whether he's sleeping, exhausted, or in shock, but Rian doesn't even react when it gets too dark to keep going and Arturo pulls into the skeleton of one of the rare buildings out here – little more than a couple of cement walls now, although that's an impressive enough survival rate. Arturo lets him rest, breaking off a chunk of dried vegetable cake for himself and washing it down with a little water.

He wouldn't be able to sleep, even if he didn't need to keep watch with them out in the open like this, within hours' reach of the Church. All the horror and fear and relief and hope that he's pushed deep below the menial work of steering the skiff is seeping out now, and so is his uncertainty about what will come next. He can't even imagine what Rian is feeling.

By the next day, he isn't sure Rian is feeling anything at all. He eats the food Arturo offers, but responds to questions only with unintelligible sounds of approval or disengagement. Arturo keeps him in the shade as much as possible, under a wide-brimmed hat. But he still burns, lips chapped and bleeding again. On the rare occasions he moves, it is with evident effort, and none of the stoic facade Arturo remembers. Rian no longer seems aloof, only exhausted.

Most of the time, Arturo might as well be alone – somehow even more alone than on his trip out, when all he could think of was finding Rian and Philomena. He begins to talk to himself the way he sometimes does on long scavenging runs, just to hear a voice. Tunelessly reciting songs from the crossroads, or poems from one of Lupe's society tapes. Reciting, almost before he realizes he's doing it, the words from Rian's holy book. _All passeth beneath the strangling worm._

How did Rian stay in that place so long?

Will he miss it, if he lives?

Arturo adds the “if” out of caution, because there's no reason Rian shouldn't live, if they can get home soon. His wounds remain difficult to look at but apparently uninfected, and he still takes food, water. Arturo just wishes he could see more of the man he's gotten to know, not this newcomer who seems barely able to focus long enough to acknowledge his presence. By the time he recognizes the desert again, they've run out of painkillers too, so he gets to watch Rian grit his teeth in pain at every bump.

When they finally reach the crossroads it takes what feels like years to walk Rian to the clinic – there might not be someone there who can fix the worst damage, but at least they can stop it from going further. The clinicians look at Arturo's stitches with mild disapproval as he gives them a retainer from the watch's proceeds – he'll tell Lupe about it later, when he explains why he's been gone so long.

The clinicians tell him he can leave and come back, but Rian raises his hand and stops them, speaking for the first time since the Church. “He should stay.”

Arturo does.

He waits as the clinicians clip his stitches to staple lines across Rian's chest, and poultice over the gashes in his arm. Rian watches them with detached interest, although that may be simply a product of the Alphanum-grade anesthetics in his system.

“Will you have to take it off?” he says, rushing the words through his sedated slur.

One of the clinicians shakes her head.

“Does that mean no?”

She nods, her work never breaking stride. “Well, unless something goes really, really wrong.”

“I – see.”

The clinician seems to understand that nothing she says will help them much. She catches Arturo's eye when she's done dressing Rian's wounds, and he nods slightly. _I'm fine,_ the nod says. _I'll stay._

Arturo pulls up a chair, careful to stay on Rian's uninjured side, and rests a hand near the bed. Rian looks over, and Arturo worries that he's done exactly the wrong thing here, suggested Rian is weak. But Rian reaches out and presses his fingers to it lightly.

“This is the part where I ought to say thank you,” he says. “Thank you.”

Arturo nearly smiles, except that the names on the record keep coming to him, unbidden. Death should be taken for granted out here; that's what Ailuo would tell him, and maybe even Lupe. It's not as though Rian has killed in cold blood, probably. There are a hundred more justifications, and maybe one of them will ease the disquiet. At least, with Rian healing, he'll have some time to find it.


	10. In the Desert, Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which an absurd amount of material goes into one chapter because the author doesn't want to break the alternating perspective pattern. Sex, comfort, and a visit to an ancient biological warfare zone, not in that order.

Rian has never realized that days could be so long. Not in the clinic, where he can pass the hours examining the crude reparation of his body. But after that, in the crossroads, where Arturo has insisted he stay until the clinic can remove the staples on his cuts. Too weak to go out but too well to sleep. Killing time with Arturo's merchant friend in the crossroads – the Californian, Ailuo.

In the first two days he makes it most of the way through the only books in Ailuo's home, which turn out to be a series of guides to Alphanum corporate etiquette. They're perfect – he can let the words' meaning glide around him, leaving behind only the occasional phrase. _A good crèche attendant will wean children of speaking age to no more than five nightly hours of sleep,_ or _personality backups are to be addressed by acting title at time of death, not highest rank achieved in life,_ or _discussion of sensitive subjects (i.e. the southern peripheral zone compulsory upskilling facilities) should be limited to colleagues within one title rank and two degrees of intimacy._ He considers asking Ailuo if this last is a euphemism for Arturo's point of origin, but decides to take the book's advice instead.

“Not much for fiction, are you?” he does ask her, when he can think clearly enough to be bored.

“Course not. Terrible stuff,” Ailuo snaps. “But those things you've got can't be much fun. Let me do you one better.”

She hands him an elaborate slab of clockworks, the gears chipped and fused. He starts to brush at its surface dubiously, and she laughs. “That's all just decoration,” she says. “The catch is on the side.” He opens it to find a chunky bakelite tablet terminal.

“How does it turn on?” he asks.

“It doesn't. You're going to learn to fix it.”

His right hand's fingers barely bend now, but it can hold the terminal down and open it up with his left, exposing the wires inside. It's reassuring to realize he's capable of even something so simple, though it's Ailuo who diagnoses the loose connection and helps him solder it in place.

She gives him new bits of high-tech detritus to pick at every day after that, settling him in her closet of a workshop while she goes out to the market. He swallows his claustrophobia – fucking hell, the coach, again – and tries not to break anything, or, since most of it is already out of commission, at least not break it further. When she comes back they eat earthy mixes of unfamiliar vegetables and she spins out stories about running with formulated intelligences in New Frisco, and he narrates the New Church's last sect war, and eventually they move on to other topics that were once everyday to each of them but sound impossibly exotic as their words hang in the dry, dusty air of the crossroads.

It shouldn't matter that Arturo hasn't returned, Rian tells himself every day.

For someone who once openly assumed they were married, Ailuo is delicate about their relationship. Rian isn't sure what Arturo told her when he arranged Rian's stay, and she gives no hints.

Until one day, just after the clinic has pulled his staples, he's fumbling for a tool behind one of Ailuo's kipple barricades and hits a small, hard cylinder. He plucks it out and sees the record, the blood on it washed down to stains. Though he wonders how it ended up here, there's not much to do with it – he certainly couldn't install it again, even if he wanted to. But it's somehow comforting to have the thing nearby. He balances it on one end beside him and goes back to work.

Ailuo spots it immediately when she returns. She knocks it down with one dexterous finger and watches it roll a three-quarter turn, until the raised port breaks its momentum.

“It bothers Arturo, you know,” she says. “The names, I mean. Not your horrorshow tribal surgery.”

“You opened it?” Rian reminds himself that this was well within their rights, and his heart shouldn't be beating this fast. “He had to have known already, didn't he? I told him what it did and about the Church and...”

Ailuo shrugs. “That's not the same as seeing it all laid out on a screen. Or knowing the names. Nothing's really real without a name.”

“He's seen people die, though, he's got to have.” He doesn't know why his voice is rising defensively either, because he shouldn't care what Arturo thinks of him. Whatever he does, it was enough to come save Rian's life. Even if the man's disappeared since then and, for all Rian knows, never intends to see him again. That's still more than Rian could have hoped for.

To his surprise, Ailuo nods sympathetically. “No, believe me, I know. And I don't blame you,” she says. “But you and me've got more in common with each other than with him, the thing is. We've had rules for when people ought to get hurt, and why. Good, evil, who knows – but it made sense, and we were part of it. Things are different out here. There's no logic to anything. It can drive you crazy. And he had to grow up in it.”

He's never thought about Alphanum as anything like the Church – it's cold and efficient and in its way, crueler. But Ailuo is right that whatever Arturo feels, it probably isn't something he can understand.

“Did he tell you anything before he left?” he asks Ailuo. “About, you know. About when he was coming back.”

Ailuo picks up the record and rolls it across her palm – her hands are lined with white hairline scars, he notices. Her thumb explores its surface as though it's the most perplexing thing she's ever seen.

“He said he was thinking,” she says.

“That's all?”

She snaps her fist around the record. “Did you want him to say something else?”

“No – no, I don't know,” he says. “I just, I have to go somewhere sometime, don't I? I have to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, assuming I have much of one coming to me. And – not that it means anything. But he's the only person I know.”

Ailuo looks at the record again. She sets it precisely at the edge of his reach, and Rian wonders who she left in California, if there was anyone at all.

“You can stay with me.”

“I couldn't do that,” he says.

“You said that fast.”

“Because I can't.” But she's right – he hadn't let himself think about it. “I'm useless.”

“You said that fast too.”

“Because it's true.” If he hesitates he'll let himself hope it's not, which will ruin the process of getting used to the idea.

“Well, just think about it.” She turns back, and he hears her pulling out the heating element to start dinner.

That night Rian weighs what she's said, and the next morning he decides that she's right – or, at least, that he's got no other options and not enough pride left to pretend otherwise. The hours play out like chess moves against a predictable but unbeatable opponent. First, the clinic, where they examine the sickly shine of his newly knit skin and declare it well. Then, the walk back to Ailuo's apartment, where he cleans badly while he waits for her return.

Then, there's a knock on the door. Rian wonders if it's someone from the Church, though he doubts he's important enough to merit more time. If they come again, at least it's better that Ailuo not be there. He puts his bad hand on the door latch, and his good one on Ailuo's galvanic knife.

“Hi,” Arturo says.

Rian nearly drops the knife. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing!”

Arturo looks taken aback. Slowly, Rian sets the knife on one of Ailuo's chairs, making sure Arturo can see – he must look like a guilty murderer, brandishing it. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn't mean to come off like that. I'm just paranoid, that's all. And I wasn't expecting you. I... sort of wasn't expecting you to come back.”

It's no way to start their conversation – although at least he'll be in his right mind for whatever happens, unlike in the clinic.

Arturo lets himself in and shuts the door. “No, I understand. I don't know why anybody'd be looking for me and I still could barely close my eyes, the first couple nights.” He drags a second chair to the kitchen nook. “Come on, sit down.”

Rian watches for traces of pity, anger – anything. But there's only the bemused friendliness Arturo seems to carry with him in all but the most desperate situations. Even this seems sinister, though, with what Ailuo has told him. He waits for Arturo to tell him to leave, or say they'll never meet again.

“I'm sorry,” he says instead.

“For what?”

“You know.” Arturo worries one of his fingernails, but he keeps his eyes on Rian. “You'd almost died. And I disappeared on you.”

This is, perhaps more than anything he's ever done, a conversation that Rian is ill-equipped to have. He could handle anger or coldness or anything that would let him simply shut emotions out. Not this painful, earnest regret.

“Ailuo told me you saw the list,” he says.

“She... she did.”

At least he doesn't apologize for that too. “It's over, you know that,” Rian says. “Philomena was the last. But I know that doesn't change it.”

“Sure it does.” Arturo shakes his head. “And I mean she's right; I've spent a lot of time going over it. But I never meant to just vanish. I should have known you'd thought I had.”

“So what have you come down on?” Rian asks.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you... all right?”

Arturo laughs. “Oh. Well, yeah, of course I am. I wanted to see if you'd come back with me.”

Very, definitely, ill-equipped. Rian stops before he can second-guess himself.

“Yes,” he says.

***

Arturo's house is smaller than Rian remembers, now that he's not distracted by simple survival. Guadalupe seems slightly less on edge, and when Arturo reintroduces them, she shakes his hand and then disappears into her salvage shed. By the time they finish the food that she's left – more vegetables whose names Rian doesn't know – it's nearly nightfall.

Arturo doesn't bring the pallet this time they go to his room. He stands awkwardly for a second, looking at the low bed. Then he puts a hand to Rian's cheek and kisses him.

This isn't like the hostel. Rian's not with someone who he expects to be leaving the next morning. Whatever happens, he'll have to wake up and talk to Arturo the next morning, with the expectation of another night, and another. Even Micah had been impermanent – they'd remained stubbornly, romantically resigned to the idea that they might be doomed lovers, until it actually happened. It had given all their interactions a lightness that Rian can't recapture here.

But he doesn't break the kiss. He draws Arturo closer and down to the bed, feeling Arturo's fingers at the waistband of his pants. That's when it all hits him.

Rian jerks back so hard he pushes Arturo off the bed in the process. His body feels like it's made of glass about to shatter under a resonant frequency. When there's space for something more in his head than reminding himself to breathe, he straightens his clothes and sits up.

“Don't – apologize,” he whispers as Arturo starts to speak. “It's not you.”

It doesn't make sense, he thinks, trying to will himself calm. He can make up reasons for why he could do this once and is panicking now, when he's healing and the whole episode is behind him. But really it's another quirk of having a body that no longer obeys him.

“Can I, I don't know, get you something?” asks Arturo, who is still standing safely clear of him.

“No, no, I'm fine, sit down, I'm fine. Everything's you know, fine.” Rian thinks the words he's speaking make sense in the order he's put them, but when he runs them over in his head they start sounding alien and he stops, because this is a case where too much thinking will only make things worse.

And of course Arturo asks if he's done something wrong, and Rian keeps trying to find something more coherent than _No, it's me, I'm wrong_ until he eventually gives up and sits in silence, hoping Guadalupe hasn't heard all this somehow.

At least Arturo does sit down beside him, silent as well.

“Are you going to actually sleep tonight?” Arturo eventually whispers.

Rian shakes his head, then realizes that Arturo can't see it in what's now total darkness. “You go ahead,” he says. “I'm going to go and...” he trails off, and Arturo thankfully doesn't press the issue.

There's not much to do in the dark, but he retrieves a damaged terminal keyboard Ailuo sent back with him and sits in one of the common room's soft chairs, feeling out the weak points where he'll be able to open it and reset the twisted keys. Their cool, smooth metal calms him, or maybe it's the sense of purpose that comes with them: an assurance that there's at least one thing he can do, however clumsily. At some point he drifts off, and wakes to the desert sun with the keyboard still nestled in his arms.

Arturo seems unruffled at breakfast, and Rian doesn't want to bring up the night before in front of Lupe. He's still waiting to get a chance when Arturo invites him on a cryptlands salvage run. It's going to be as good a time as any to deal with it, Rian supposes. They exchange only pleasantries with each other and Lupe as they pack up, and when they start the hike he remembers that he's still not in the kind of shape that would leave him enough energy to talk as well. Besides, it's fascinating enough to take in the desert, where the remains of pre-Razes transport lines dot the landscape, as natural and as alien as the rock formations around them.

The grueling trek between Arturo's house and the cryptlands border is much shorter than he'd thought. He doesn't remember his rescue clearly enough to know if this is the place Arturo found him, but there's no sign of the men, or of human life at all.

The further they walk, though, the more inhuman life thrives. It begins as ordinary-looking scrub, a little bit too bright. Soon Rian notices the mat of grass beneath his feet, and the towers – the not-crypts – in the distance. Then the forest rises around them.

It takes Rian a moment to realize that the forest – a word that refers to things he's only seen in tapes – is not made of trees or brush. It's something like dead vines, hardened around each other in permanent contortions. He approaches one to get a closer look, but Arturo pulls him back.

“Don't touch anything,” Arturo tells him. “It's all safe, or should be. But you never really know out here.”

Rian wonders what the vines were supposed to achieve, and what inspired someone to set them against this place, besides the general chaos of the Razes. If there was a moment in which the decision was made to kill a city, or if it simply slipped down a chain of command, gathering speed like water slipping down a string. Whoever the targets were, their ruined houses are beginning to fence him and Arturo in, as the two of them walk the pitted remains of an asphalt road. Their outside walls, though, are scratched with a far more recent mark.

“I've stripped most of these over the years,” Arturo says. “A few left to clean out, but the real stuff's farther in now. The best of it's in the towers, of course.”

“The crypts,” Rian answers.

“Yes. But I'm not going there,” Arturo adds quickly. “Just a little bit closer, is all. Don't touch anything.”

“You told me that already.”

“Sorry.”

They've slowed, picking their way along the street. Every moment longer is just putting off a necessary conversation. Rian clears his throat, wondering if Arturo will warn him off even breathing out here. “I'm going to get better, you know,” he says. “I don't want you to think I'm damaged, or I mean, more than usual. I don't want pity.”

“What?” Arturo pauses in the middle of drawing on a pair of battered rubber gloves. “What are you talking about?”

“Last night. Obviously.” Who lived here, in the cement ruin they're about to enter? How many lives has Arturo excavated? What remained of them? “I'm not going to make you live with someone who's afraid of being fucking touched.”

Arturo chops back a tough, stringy curtain of wire that must once have been a door. “Why would you think I'd be worried about that?” he asks, sounding genuinely confused. “I don't expect anything from you. Come on, let's head inside.”

Inside, the house has been oddly well-preserved. Age is in the process of eating its walls from within, but the furniture is still arranged with purpose, its quantity suggesting a home that was crowded despite its size.

“I know you don't expect anything,” Rian says. “That's why I've got to stand in for the self-interested bastard you ought to be sometimes. And that bastard says _It's not your job to wait for a charity case you barely know to sort himself out enough for basic human contact._ ”

Arturo briskly cases the parlor, tracing a smaller mark onto one miniature rolltop table. “I usually come back with a cart for the stuff that's hard to carry. Saves me from dragging something around until I really need it,” he says. “And I don't know why you think, I don't know, I only want you here for pity or for sex.” He sweeps a couple of curios into a bag he's taken from his pack. “If you need me to give you some self-interested reason, it's that I'd forgotten how lonely everything was out here before I met you. Do whatever you need to. I'm just glad to have you exist.”

The bedrooms hold little that's movable; Rian sees no bones or bodies, so maybe the occupants left with everything they could carry. Arturo marks a few more pieces and completes the house's loop, ending up in a kitchen whose every surface seems to be peeling: the counters, the fragments of blistered wallpaper, the faux-tile floor. It's the first moment Rian feels as though he's grasped the true desolation of the place, the fact that it is not a museum or a monument or a trash heap like the Church's moat. That it will always be defined by the spaces that can never be polished or curated or repurposed – by its unshakable ghosts.

“Well, that's pleasantly mercenary of you,” Rian tells Arturo, as breezily as he can manage. “I'm convinced.”

While Arturo searches the cabinets, Rian mulls his words. They may have been offered as a way to save face, but as excuses go, they seem more plausible with every minute Rian spends in the cryptlands.

They do one more house, a cheap small thing that has all but collapsed. By then the light has deepened, sending shadows slinking into the vines. Arturo says they should head out then, strapping his bag of salvage to his pack and refusing Rian's offer of help – _no offense, but you should get a little stronger for that._

He's right, Rian soon realizes – the walk alone has been exhausting. When they cross to the desert and make camp he sinks to a rock and devours a meal of dried meat and vegetable tack before sleeping. His muscles protest when he wakes the next morning, and their soreness slows him on the walk back, but it's a bearable, nearly healthy pain. Far better than his first trip back to Arturo's home, he thinks, glancing down to the dark rings still just visible around his wrists.

***

When they return he feels the beginning of a pattern, like his routine at Ailuo's: the dinner, the bath, the lazy conversation with Lupe – who no longer seems to regard him as a bad omen – afterward. Sleeping in the bed that Arturo insists on giving him again. Waking with the sun and convincing Lupe to let him lay out the keyboard in her shed where he can begin the slow process of fixing it. Prizing the shell open and leaving when Lupe returns to do her own work. Spending the rest of the day on itinerant chores and talking with Arturo about anything they can find in common. Dinner. Wash. Sleep. Repeat.

Rian politely refuses Lupe's offer of aid when she sees him grappling with a spudging tool left-handed. But he lets Arturo help him, conscious of every incidental touch. Arturo solicitously avoids anything more intimate than that, and Rian doesn't initiate, afraid that he'll misjudge his own limits. Still, he catches himself arranging pieces of the keyboard in ways that will press them together, as subtly as he might box in a dueling opponent.

Lupe works much quicker than he does, and a few days later she's put together enough to make another crossroads run. This time she's the one that does it: _This is actually good stuff_ , she tells Arturo. _Damn if I'm going to go let Ailuo undersell you on it._ In her absence Rian works beyond his ordinary hour or two, nudging the last key into place and shutting the hardware back up hex by hex.

“That looks good.”

Rian nods, keeping his eyes on the keyboard – he's not too out of Church practice to have caught the sound of Arturo opening the door and approaching. “I still have to test it,” he says. “Ailuo calls it quick brown fox QA. I have no idea what she means.”

“I'm sure she's just glad to have somebody to share her random bits of culture with,” says Arturo. “Lupe is a hard no on anything that might be Alphanum.”

Even with the fan that keeps the shed bearable during daytime, Rian can feel Arturo's body heat and the not-quite-touch of his shoulder as he leans over and looks at the keyboard. “So what do you do if it works?”

“Send it back. Find something else,” Rian says. “Who knows, maybe I'll be all right at this eventually.”

“You know Lupe tried to teach me once, right?”

“I didn't.” He turns and looks at Arturo, taking in the easy tan of his skin and the sheen of sweat on his forehead. “What happened? You snapped an antique circuit plate in the first hour with your strong, artless grip?”

Arturo laughs. “No, I mean – I just wasn't very good at it.” He stops. “Artless?”

“Sure,” Rian says. “But strong.”

He squeezes his hand around Arturo's arm for emphasis, feeling his own pulse quicken as his fingers catch the soft arches of relaxed muscle. This is it, he thinks. If there's ever a time to try, it's now, as he pulls Arturo into an embrace.

Arturo takes a moment to respond, as though he's figuring out what's going on. But when Rian feels Arturo's hands against the fabric of his shirt, his body floods with heat, nerves strung taut in anticipation. He lets Arturo press him back against the edge of the table as Rian pulls Arturo's shirt over his shoulders. Their eyes meet, and there's a moment of silent negotiation – _are you okay?_ – that he tries not to bristle at, because for once he's grateful to have someone acknowledge the cracks in his composure.

He has a moment of doubt when he sees his scars bared, but it's subsumed by the jolt of arousal as Arturo rubs at his growing erection. It's been so long since he was able to think only of a moment, like this – not to make anxious plans for the future or regret the past. To whisper _god I want you inside me_ in someone's ear and feel the nod against his shoulder and the hand fumbling against his pants, to find one of the workshop's oils and brace himself against the wall as Arturo runs a hand down his back. He gasps at the feel of Arturo's fingers, reaching back to pull him closer. Rian's body hums with pleasure, until he pants to Arturo – now – and Arturo slides his cock in slowly.

His movement rocks Rian against the wall, its plaster smooth and warm. He's never felt anyone as expressive, as undone, as Arturo seems right now. But then Rian has never done this outside the rigid geometry of the Church – not in any way he'd count as sex.

Arturo puts an arm around Rian's hips and slips his fingers around his shaft, and it's enough to send Rian shaking as he comes. Arturo moans and jerks him close, and then they're done, spent, Rian's head clearing enough to worry immediately that they've broken something or that Lupe will walk in on them or a hundred other half-formed dangers. Then Arturo kisses his neck and he forgets it all again.

That night they sleep in Arturo's bed together for the first time. When Arturo is dead to the world, softly snoring, Rian looks up into the darkness. He wishes there were some force he could thank for this moment of improbable, merciful fortune. But he's not Philomena – if there is a thing like Levantine's God, he knows it can be nothing but but indifferent or cruel. There is only the luck that men and women make for themselves, and the kindnesses they exchange. The foolish decisions to foster fragile, hopeful life over the safe certainty of death.

Rian has made few enough of those decisions. With time, perhaps he will make more.

And with luck, he won't do it alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's now stuck it out through four randomly geographically placed post-apocalyptic romances. These are tangled and self-indulgent and I've very much enjoyed writing them.


End file.
